Gemma smiled, knowing my seal of approval when she saw it.

I offered him my best Sunday smile. “So, now? Would now be a good time to hang at your crib?”

He chuckled. “Sure, if it’s okay with you, sir.”

Uncle Bob hung up and nodded wholeheartedly. “It’s more than okay. I’ll meet you there.”

He left to make yet another call. That man loved his phone.

We went en masse to the house of Officer Wyatt Pierce. He was renting a small two-bedroom in Nob Hill. It was a nice neighborhood, old and well established. Uncle Bob walked in still on the phone. He hung up as we went inside.

“Okay, I have Taft following up on our leads right now, and I’ve contacted Special Agent Carson to fill her in as well.”

“Awesome,” I said. “She’ll like me even more.”

“I just want to prepare you,” Wyatt said to Gemma as we stepped toward the back bedroom.

“For what?” Gemma asked.

“Remember when you asked me if I’d been able to put that night behind me and I said yes?”

“I do,” she said, wary.

“Well, I may have exaggerated.”

He unlocked and opened the door. Hundreds of papers littered every available surface. The window was covered in old news clippings and pictures. There were dozens of drawings of huge eyes hidden behind a mass of blond hair. He was quite the artist, and he had been searching for years. That girl never left him. He clearly felt responsible for her disappearance, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

“You realize that none of that was your fault,” I said.

“I know.” He added a completely unconvinced shrug for my benefit. He had no intention of shirking the responsibility he felt. I admired him for his conviction, but I could see worry flash in Gemma’s eyes.

We walked in and perused his research material. He had collected evidence on every missing girl in that time period from all over the United States.

“I don’t know if this will help, but I suspect the girl was Deaf.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“It’s a hunch. I suspected it anyway, but when you said you’d tried to call to her and she didn’t look up at first, it made me realize she probably was.”

“Wait.” He held up a finger in thought, then tore through some files he had on an old trunk. “There was a girl missing from the Oklahoma School for the Deaf.” He found the file he was looking for and took out a picture. “This is her.”

He handed it over and a jolt of recognition spiked within me. Same pixie face. Same bow-shaped mouth and huge eyes, only she was smiling in the picture and her bangs were crooked. I ran my fingertips over her image. “It’s her eyes,” I said, and then I showed the picture to Cookie and Uncle Bob. “This is the girl.” I turned the picture over. Her name was Faith Ingalls.

“It was so dark out there,” Wyatt said, “and she was covered in dirt and blood, almost like she’d been buried and dug back up. I just didn’t recognize her from this picture.”

“Did they ever solve this case?” Uncle Bob asked.

He read through the file. “Not when I was looking into it, but that was a few years ago. She’d been missing for over a decade. They suspected a maintenance man by the name of Saul Ussery but could never prove it.”

I read over his shoulder. “Did you get anything else on him?”

“No, but we can run the name,” he said. “Something might come up now.”

Uncle Bob put down the file he was reading. “I can do that.” He called in to the station while I had other plans.

The girl was probably the serial killer’s first victim. His trial run. He wanted her but couldn’t have her, so he tried to take her by force perhaps. He may even have killed her accidentally, though I doubted it. He seemed to enjoy the act even then. The power. And it only fueled his thirst for blood. His obsession for blond women.

I tried Agent Carson first, but couldn’t get through. If she was at the mass grave site, she could have been out of bars. So I called Kenny Knight instead.

“Mr. Knight,” I said when he picked up. “This is Charley Davidson, a consultant for APD. We met yesterday.”

“Yes, I remember.” He didn’t seem particularly happy to hear from me. I could hardly blame him.

“I was wondering if I could run a name by you. See if you recognize it.”

“Sure.” He was spent and tired of all the media that had surely hit that morning. The sheriff’s department had no choice but to announce the discovery of a mass grave, and every news crew in the state had to be there, vying for a story.

“Do you know or do you remember your parents ever hiring a man named Saul Ussery?”

“Saul? No, he never worked here. My parents couldn’t stand him.”

Adrenaline flooded my system. “Wait, they knew him?”

“Knew him? He was their nephew. My cousin. He only showed up when he needed money or a place to sleep. Wait, the oil —”

I snapped to get Uncle Bob’s attention. Both he and Wyatt rushed over to listen in as I switched on the speakerphone. “What about the oil?” I asked.

“It just didn’t occur to me. Saul drove a truck for several years. He worked for some company that recycled plastics and used oil. Part of his job was to truck the oil they collected from mechanic shops and restaurants to a processing company in Cruces every few weeks.”